How Up ditched Docker and halved their Android test times

Software Engineer at Up, a digital bank headquartered in Melbourne, shares their experience of improving Android build and testing speeds by 65%. The team initially faced scalability issues with on-device testing due to the complexity and resource intensity. They moved from running tests on hardware they had lying around to leveraging Docker based testing across custom multi-regional autoscaling pool of Buildkite agents running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). However, this approach led to flakey and time consuming testing. By removing Docker, better utilising GCP hardware, and using Buildkite parallelisation, they achieved significant improvements in Android build and testing speeds. The team also tested the impact of higher base CPU clock speed and adding a GPU but found that the former had a more significant effect on test times. Overall, their Android testing infrastructure is now more stable, scalable, and easier to maintain.